Izzy on a Roll

He’s sort of wild to watch, Izzy Cohen, as he twirls short strips of dough, one per hand, into rings that wrap around his fingers. Without pausing, both slender arms in simultaneous motion, he rolls the rings back and forth, smoothing the dough, sealing the seams. All at once, the dough transforms into bagels, one in each hand. He glances up at the rolling machine, a contraption that shapes pieces of dough into strips and spits them out onto a revolving canvas slide (it looks a little like a practice ski slope for bread dough), and grabs two more strips.

You’ll notice that his technique is different from what you may have read elsewhere--in the article above, for instance. Izzy, a baker for most of his 76 years, is patient with bagel bakers who take the easy way out and punch bagel holes in their dough with their fingers. Izzy himself has made compromises through the years, that machine, for instance, which forms the dough into strips. But he sticks by his shaping technique: “You’re not making a roll,” he says with a snort. “You’re making a bagel.”

This is what Izzy says of a bagel he doesn’t respect: “Where’s the sugar?” He means it might as well be a doughnut.

“I’ve been through a bit of the hinterlands, I stop at places and look for bagels. A lot of nothing passes for bagels. They’re round. They have a hole.”

When it comes to bagels, there are many things that Izzy insists on. High-gluten flour, the stuff that says high-protein on many supermarket packages, might be the most important ingredient. “Without high-gluten,” Izzy says with a solemn shake of his head, “you can’t make a bagel. Last week, I came to the bakery and walked right out five minutes later--no high-gluten flour.” And no bagels that week.

“Some of these cookbooks,” Izzy says, “I don’t know, you read the instructions and they say, ‘Boil the bagels for two minutes on each side.’ Two minutes! You should barely cook them 20 seconds.”

But those 20 seconds are important.

“Cooking the dough serves a useful function,” he says. “It kills off some of the yeast on the outside layer of dough and makes a tight skin. It also cooks the starch on the outside layer, which gives a bagel its shine. If you put two bagels in an oven, one boiled, one not boiled, the one that’s cooked will be smaller because the cooked skin inhibits growth. Of course, the longer you boil it, the thicker that skin gets.”

Some bakeries, however, skip the boiling step of the bagel-making process by using steam ovens. “There have been trends,” Izzy says darkly. “Sure, the steam moistens the skin of the bread; it promotes a shine too. But the bagels aren’t as chewy because the outside layer doesn’t really get cooked like it should.”

He contemplates this sort of bagel for a moment, then says, “I guess they pass as bagels out in the hinterlands.”

New Yorkers’ snipes to the contrary, Los Angeles is not the bagel hinterlands, and for 23 years Izzy baked bagels and other goods at a bakery called the Picson. “It was a combination of Pico and Robertson boulevards,” he explains, then quickly adds, “We bought it from somebody else.”

Since the early ‘70s, when Izzy sold Picson, he’s been a baker without a bakery. A samurai baker of sorts, Izzy offers his services wherever he thinks he can be useful. Fridays and Saturdays, you’ll find him at Fred’s Bakery on Robertson. And on Sunday mornings, before 5 a.m., he drives to an industrial warehouse on Washington Boulevard to make bagels with two other bakers for the Sunday brunch crowd that shops at La Brea Bakery.

“I’d read about this bakery on La Brea and said to a cousin of mine, ‘Let’s go over there.’ So we walk in and introduce ourselves as two old Jewish bakers. The owner, Nancy (Silverton) says, ‘Retired Jewish bakers? Can you teach me how to make bagels?’ We said, sure. Of course, my cousin, he’s never come back.”

Izzy came back. And eventually, he decided to stick around and make bagels.

He is quick to point out, however, that the bagels he’s making are not the best in the city. That honor he bestows on L.A.’s Brooklyn Bagel on Beverly Boulevard.

“If I made the dough and shaped it a day before, I’d have a better bagel. Nothing develops flavor like fermentation. But I come in here at 5 in the morning and I have to have the bagels out by 8. I can’t wait for the dough to ferment properly.”

Izzy does have a few tricks to develop flavor. He uses malt for flavor and plenty of yeast. And he sneaks in two 10-minute resting periods for the dough, once after it’s mixed and again after it’s shaped. Then, before he cooks the bagels in water, he puts the bagels in a warm oven for 15 seconds to boost the yeast.

Other bakers have other tricks, but he doesn’t approve of all of them. “You can put sugar in there, you can put fat in there, you can put milk in there, but if you don’t have fermentation, all the flavor will be on the tongue, not in the chew. And the real flavor comes in chewing.

“And what’s the worst thing that could happen to a bagel?” Izzy says, jabbing his finger into the air to make sure you get the point. “It could lack flavor.”